“I see the Farmers Market Promotion Program as this unique success story in USDA programs,” says Stacy Miller, executive director of the Farmers Market Coalition (FMC), who explains that the program’s goal is to offer communities and small food producers a helping hand.

The FMPP started receiving funding in 2006, though it was created through an amendment to the Farmer-to-Consumer Direct Marketing Act in 1976. The latest grant awardees, who were announced in October, collectively received $9.2 million. With about $33 million allotted by the farm bill, the program has about $10 million more to offer for the 2012 fiscal year. Carmen Humphrey, head of the FMPP, says the program was born of “a need to support under-resourced producers; it was a mutual need that Congress saw.”

Farmers markets have seen a steady increase since 1994. In 2011, the USDA counted 7,173 farmers markets, a 17 percent increase from 2010. The Farmers Market Coalition says that as recently as 2005, farmers market direct to consumer sales were already exceeding $1 billion nationwide.

Through the FMPP, projects can obtain minimum funding of $5,000 and up to $100,000 for efforts such as agri-tourism, marketing campaigns, setting up community supported agriculture (CSA) subscriptions or professional development training for market managers and organizers — all with the goal of establishing, expanding or promoting local food production. The need is great. In 2010, 81 out of 500 applicants were funded, and Miller notes that “our members are reliant on that program; many apply, few get funded.” 

With a grant from the Farmers Market Promotion Program, the Mississippi Cleveland Farmers Market created a market garden and worked on outreach and education, teaching community residents techniques for freezing, canning and pickling to preserve seasonal foods for “year-round healthy eating.”

This year the program will provide funds to buy a solar-powered cooler and freezer to store CSA produce in Hawaii, to support 15 new Chicago-area winter farmers markets, to open a new seafood market in Louisiana for local fishermen, to expand a market community kitchen in New Mexico, and to support livestock farmers transitioning to 100 percent grass-fed meat in Wisconsin.

As the program has evolved, Electronic Benefit Transfers, or EBT – part of the Supplemental Nutriton Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly called food stamps – have become a bigger part of it.

Humphrey notes the important role accepting SNAP benefits at farmers markets plays in both boosting the local economy and giving communities — especially lower income areas — greater access to healthy and fresh foods. “It helps across the board, supporting the economy as a whole,” Humphrey says. FMPP has made more efforts recently to focus on food deserts and fresh produce availability in low-income areas.

The food-assistance benefits used to be paper coupons, which were easy for farmers markets to accept. But with the debit card system, markets need to have the right technology. Currently, EBT programs must account for 10 percent of FMPP funding. 

According to Soo Kim, a USDA spokesperson, this year, the Farmers’ Market Promotion Program awarded 17 new and 20 existing EBT projects, representing about 24 percent of total funding for the year.

Miller and Helen Dombalis, from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) would like to see that funding taken out of the FMPP’s responsibility and given to the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). The FNS currently pays for electronic benefit transfer technology in grocery stores, and Dombalis wonders why this shouldn’t be extended to farmers markets as well.

They hope this would open up funding to help train grantees who have EBT machines, rather than just “throwing technology at them.” Miller would like to see more technical training, help in setting up accounting for the system and sharing best practices with different farmers markets.

The way Miller sees it, FMPP is doing a lot, but it still isn’t quite enough. This is not necessarily the program managers’ fault, she says, they just need greater resources. She would like to see more training programs for market managers, as well as more professional development and sharing of best practices within the farmers market industry. 

“The program has been developed in an agency with no history of grant programs,” Miller says. “The Agriculture Marketing Service has done an incredible job to grow to administer the program. But there’s a lot that they want to do, but can’t.”

FMPP is limited by it annual budget, and the funding cycle is limited by the end of the current farm bill. 

It’s unclear what will happen to FMPP funding under the new farm bill. On Nov. 1, the original co-sponsors Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-ME, and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-OH, introduced the Local and Regional Farm and Food Bill, intended for inclusion in the 2012 Farm Bill.  It includes a provision to improve local and regional food system infrastructure and markets through the Local Marketing Promotion Program – the former Farmers Market Promotion Program – plus funding for larger scale, non-direct local marketing at $30 million per year.

Dombalis thinks it very important to not only maintain indefinitely the progress already made in promoting local food systems, but to expand on those efforts. She worries that the USDA might not view these smaller programs as important to include in the next farm bill. 

Miller says that the “hallmark of the FMPP program” has been its support of the transparent relationship between farmers and consumers in farmers market settings, fostering direct interaction between those who grow or make food and those who buy locally produced groceries. She says the grant programs should be rooted in transparency as well, remaining accountable to the community and stakeholders.

With hopes of compiling a database of all the programs funded by FMPP, the Farmers Market Coalition has assembled a group of volunteers to get started. Such a database would provide guidance for a local food c
ommunity that still is fra
gmented, especially because there are no national conventions for farmers market managers.

As of yet, the database project has no funding, but Miller says the importance of a comprehensive program list is that even those who are not funded by FMPP can benefit from the knowledge and innovation in farmers markets across the country. 

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Lindsey Kratochwill is a magazine journalism and environmental policy student at Northwestern University.

Groups such as the Gluten Free Certification Organization, the Celiac Sprue Association, the Canadian Celiac Association and the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness each suggest different guidelines to establish a gluten threshold level.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not yet have a rule for gluten-free labeling. It proposed one in 2007 – that foods could be marketed as gluten-free if they contain less than 20 parts per million (ppm), or 20 milligrams per kilogram of gluten. That’s consistent with labeling rules from Codex Alimentarius, which is also used in Europe.

The FDA acknowledges that the term “free” does not necessarily mean that a food contains none of a particular substance. For example, foods labeled as cholesterol-free foods may contain up to 2 mg of cholesterol.

Four years have elapsed since FDA proposed its labeling rules for gluten and a decision on whether to accept them has yet to be made. The agency recently re-opened a 60-day comment period – which ended in October – to get new input on the guidelines. Now the food and restaurant industry and those in the celiac and gluten intolerant community anxiously await the agency’s decision.

Gluten is found in wheat, barley and rye and therefore in foods processed using these grains. The protein components of gluten (gliadins and glutelins) can trigger an autoimmune reaction in some people called celiac disease, the most common food-sensitive intestinal problem. According to the FDA, approximately 1 percent of the American population has the inherited digestive disorder.

For those who can’t tolerate gluten, it can be hard to know what to trust when it comes to processed foods, or even some medicines or vitamins. If a celiac ingests gluten in a high enough concentration, it can cause deterioration of the small intestine when the immune system attacks the villi lining the small intestine. It can also lead to other digestive problems and malabsorption of nutrients.

Registered Dietitian Tricia Thompson from Massachusetts has gotten a lot of questions from consumers about the safety of so-called gluten-free foods. Over time, she says, it has become harder to justify the 20 ppm threshold – which FDA has said is the minimum level at which gluten can be reliably and consistently detected – because many manufacturers are already producing foods with gluten amounts well under that level. It’s now possible to precisely test amounts as minute as 5 ppm, she notes.

Thompson believes that if the FDA lowers the allowable limit of gluten it shouldn’t affect food cost or availability adversely. While she believes that the less-than 20 ppm gluten level is probably safe for the majority of people with celiac disease, she hopes that the FDA will consider lowering the 20 ppm rule – if not to 5, perhaps to 10 or 15 ppm to help ease the minds of those who believe they react to very low levels of gluten.

Peter Olins, a PhD biochemist who runs the website ultimateglutenfree.com, agrees. In his comment on the FDA recommendation, Olins wrote, “Currently, it appears that a level of 5 ppm gluten can be reliably measured, and we see no benefit in setting a higher threshold.”

Olins also thinks an alternative to the ppm measure would be to instead label the amount of gluten per serving measurement. Such a change would increase the number of foods that can be classified as gluten-free, because of small serving sizes.

“A label such as 20 ppm gluten is really a measure of concentration; however, it seems most likely that the toxicity of gluten is related to total daily quantity ingested, not concentration,” Olins said in his letter.

He notes that people are already used to measuring calories by individual food servings.

While Thompson can see the reasoning behind this, she fears it could prove to be unworkable for manufacturers. According to her research, different batches of the same food can contain different amounts of gluten. If labels gave specific information about the amount of gluten per serving, it could not be trusted to be uniform across batches. Therefore manufacturers would need to produce many different labels for their foods.

One issue confusing the gluten labeling debate is the FDA’s own Health Hazard Assessment,  published in May 2011, which listed Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) values so low that critics say people with celiac disease will be afraid to eat. The safety assessment found that TDI for gluten to be 0.4 milligrams per day for “adverse effects on the intestinal mucosa” and 0.015 milligrams per day for adverse effects on clinical symptoms.

In a post on Thompson’s website, she calls many of the TDI estimates “ridiculously low” and notes that based on those numbers, people with celiac disease would have to limit themselves to less than a 1 ounce slice of bread containing 20 ppm of gluten each day to prevent intestinal damage, and far less to prevent clinical effects. The FDA also seems to doubt the numbers, and tentatively concluded that “based on the [levels of concern] identified in the safety assessment approach, the Agency should not use that approach in defining ‘gluten-free’ because the estimation of risk to individuals with celiac disease associated with very low exposure levels may be conservative and highly uncertain.”

In her comment to the FDA, Thompson said the regulators should consider “explaining in much more detail why they believe the findings of the Health Hazard Assessment to be conservative and highly uncertain. An explanation may help decrease anxiety among those who are very concerned about the published TDI values.”

“They need to explain to consumers why they don’t have a lot of confidence [in the TDI values],” Thompson says. “They owe it to consumers to decrease fear … so that consumers are confident in the proposed gluten threshold level of less than 20 ppm gluten.”

Olins also wants more information for consumers. On items that are labeled as gluten-free, he would like to see a text box warning that the food may in fact contain trace amounts of gluten.

“This approach would provide the best ‘truth-in-labeling,’ and would satisfy the needs of the consumer/physician/dietitian in selecting appropriate foods,” Olins says in his letter.

In a joint submission to the docket, the Celiac Sprue Association (CSA) commented on the proposed labeling rules, along with the Celiac Disease Foundation, Gluten Intolerance Group of North America, Canadian Celiac Association and the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness. Their recommendation, which is posted on the CSA website, supports a single definition of gluten-free, saying a dual definition of gluten-free and low-gluten would be confusing.

A study published in June by the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, titled “Gluten Contamination of Grains, Seeds, and Flours in the United States,” found that nine out of 22 inherently gluten-free products, such as corn or millet, contained mean levels of gluten varying from 8.5 ppm to 2,925 ppm.  The 13 other products had gluten levels below 5 ppm.

Given those findings, the ADA Journal said, “Gluten contamination of inherently gluten-free grains, seeds, and flours not labeled gluten-free is a legitimate concern. The FDA may want to modify their proposed rule for labeling of food as gluten-free, removing the requirement that gluten-free manufacturers of inherently gluten-free grains, seeds, and flours must state on product labels that all foods of that type are gluten-free.”

Stephen King, press liaison for the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said in an email that the agency is reviewing the comments and evaluating the information to determine if any changes need to be made to the rule.

At this point, predicting which way the agency is leaning, King says, “would be speculative.”

King says the process is rather involved, but the agency hopes to see the rule published within three months of the comment period close, though that depends on the time it takes to review comments, and whether the rule needs to be edited.